Misreading status as class: A reply to our critics (original) (raw)

Within these three moderate and fair-minded critiques of our essay, a central criticism concerns the accuracy of our portrayal of the class paradigm. This is partly an empirical question, and partly a matter of semantics. The summary propositions are derived from the class literature with the intention of capturing typicality rather than constructing an easy target. Naturally, our critics have every right to distance themselves from some of the elements. Indeed, we insist that not all four propositions are embraced by every class approach with equal vigor, and that one would expect to find differences among class theorists on the precise meaning of "the fundamental structuring principle;' "real features" or "transformative capacity." We endorse Wright's objection to the excessive determinism that characterizes some versions and his stress on the relative autonomy of politics. However, we disagree with our critics on two points. First, Manza and Brooks's depiction of our argument as "one-sided" and "misleading," relies on a misinterpretation. Of course, class analysts can and do address racial, ethnic, and gender divisions, but it is simply a fact that they do so within a context of an either explicitly stated or an assumed primacy of economic-class divisions. This means privileging class divisions and relations by disproportionate attention or by misattributing causal directionality. This should be seen as a fair representation of not only the more orthodox Marxism of, say, Poulantzas or Miliband but also of more sophisticated neo-Marxist analyses of Wright and the "neo-Weberian" class studies of Marshall et al. 1 Such analyses also seldom theorize these non-class divisions. Second, we contest Wright's claim (implicitly endorsed by Manza and Brooks 2) that "class primacy is not an essential component of class analysis." We take the not unreasonable position that if the class para